Quotes by Sri Lankan Authors - Page 2

China has no choice but to emulate the power of America’s founding ideas and its journey through the universal values of democratic freedom and individual rights.
Patrick Mendis
The government of Pakistan is yet to understand that the insurgency is not the disease but the symptoms of the disease. If the government really needs to cure the crisis in the area, then it must engage in genuine treatment procedure rather than engage in ad hoc solutions that go under the motto: picked up, killed, and dumped. Kidnapping the target and dumping his or her bullet riddled and tortured corpse in a public place to scare the people in the area is a military strategy which aims to provide a lesson to those who still retain seeds of resistance. If this is the only solution that the government is capable of then it will have to commit genocide against the people of Balochistan so that it can continue to steal their natural resources and have total control of the province.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
They had lived down the road from each other as children. Everyday they walked home from school hand in hand; they were childhood sweethearts, they were bestfriends. And when they came of age, in the time-honoured Sri Lankan tradition they were given in marriage. To other people.
Ashok Ferrey
How we are almost nothing. We think, in our youth, we are the centre of the universe, but we simply respond, go this way or that by accident, survive or improve by the luck of the draw, with little choice or determination on our part.
Michael Ondaatje
Don't be nervous..be Excited....
gayan fonseka
Unlike Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China, the United States was created by an enlightened band of Founding Fathers with a global vision for the new republic.
Patrick Mendis
Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert.
Michael Ondaatje
How fair is it to judge a person based on his sexual preferences, or their ‘otherness’? As long as a person is not ‘harmful’ for others or not violating the rights of others, I think we need not be bothered about their personal lives, whom they love or whom they marry. It is a personal choice. I think the most important thing about a person is his or her ‘humanity’, kindness, selflessness not their ‘sex life’ (only as long as he or she is not violating the rights of others or causing harm to others).It is entirely a disgrace on humanity to ‘discriminate’ a person solely based on their ‘otherness’. I am surprised to see how the society stands against or make fun out of ‘gay’ people, who are totally harmless, ignoring the ‘human’ in them, but feel ‘OK’ with ‘rapists’, ‘sex maniacs’, ‘prostitution’ and ‘sexual violence against women and children’ occurring in Sri Lanka every day.
Ama H. Vanniarachchy
A convergence exists in the search for human excellence on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.
Patrick Mendis
...a well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.
Arthur C. Clarke
There is no unmoving mover behind the movement. It is only movement. It is not correct to say that life is moving, but life is movement itself. Life and movement are not two different things. In other words, there is no thinker behind the thought. Thought itself is the thinker. If you remove the thought, there is no thinker to be found.
Walpola Rahula
We have passed some of the dirtiest chapters of mankind. Perhaps we are heading towards further inhuman treatments in many places such as Syria and Palestine.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
You realize how much you love someone once that someone is gone…gone forever, and you are filled with regret and sadness.
Ama H. Vanniarachchy
The man on the top of the hierarchy has created social fear in order for us to accept him as the leader.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
Words are my weapons. They might kill or cure the readers, that’s out of my control.
Ama H. Vanniarachchy
When the time has come, every leaf turns to face the sun!
Akilnathan Logeswaran
He did not know that the Old One was his father, for such a relationship was utterly beyond his understanding, but as he looked at the emaciated body he felt a dim disquiet that was the ancestor of sadness.
Arthur C. Clarke
Generally, that humble piece of furniture placed on the front veranda of the house officially belonged to the man of the household; the women never slept on it.
Swarnakanthi Rajapakse
There were, however, a few exceptions.One was Norma Dodsworth, the poet, who had not unpleasantly drunk but had been sensible enough to pass out before any violent action proved necessary. He had been deposited, not very gently, on the lawn, where it was hoped that a hyena would give him a rude awakening. For all practical purposes he could, therefore, be regarded as absent.
Arthur C. Clarke
Don't leave the dream, lead your dreams!
Akilnathan Logeswaran
We can only suppose that Buddhism has been so much admired mainly for what it is not. A well known modem writer on the subject has remarked that “Buddhism in its purity ignored the existence of a God; it denied the existence of a soul; it was not so much a religion as a code of ethics”. We can understand the appeal of this on the one hand to the rationalist and on the other to the sentimentalist. Unfortunately for these, all three statements arc untrue, at least in the sense in which they are meant. It is with another Buddhism than this that we arc in sympathy and are able to agree; and that is the Buddhism of the texts as they stand.
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Arthur C. Clarke
He had sometimes wondered if the real reason why men sought danger was that only thus could they find the companionship and solidarity which they unconsciously craved.
Arthur C. Clarke
At birth and at dawn for each and every dayit triumphs over the eclipse.It is the very first thing that you see.Its power is blinding at first, anon it opens our eyes to the allure of the world.Each moment it breathes life into us,warms our souls and colors our skin.At gloaming it seems to wane,while it privily awaits a timeto give birth to a new circle of life.
Akilnathan Logeswaran
If any religion turns against love of equal partners, there's something flawed with the religion, not the love.
Akilnathan Logeswaran
How can you cry for others’ struggles when you are facilitating mayhem in your own land?
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
The villagers considered it lucky to make the New Year's first money transaction with her because she was a prosperous person.
Swarnakanthi Rajapakse
Leaving is an act that cannot be undone.
Nayomi Munaweera
The campus spreads around him like the verdant pleasure garden of an ancient king. He is enraptured by the enormous trees that lift branches like cathedral roofs overhead, shoot roots like polished ballroom floors underfoot. In the hot afternoons he leaves the crowded rooms to study under the protection of these spreading giants.
Nayomi Munaweera
This is the beginning of what we will come to call the Upstairs-Downstairs, Linga-Singha wars.
Nayomi Munaweera
Mr. President, it is time for you to give me back my country. You can either continue to make fools of the people who elected a tyrant like you or let the country rise phoenix-like from the ashes.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
On some days it felt like we owned the Earth, and the only place left to expand to was the next planet down the line.
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
She talks in her most sedate voice, attempting to alleviate out fears, soothe our anxiety. She knows that if we are to survive watching this war from a distance, as spectators, we do not have the privilege of indignation or anxiety.
Nayomi Munaweera
This two-track plan of nationalism and development (in China) is a historically powerful weapon.
Patrick Mendis
We work very hard to have what Buddha gave up to become enlightened. Does that mean we are benighted?
Rohan and Mohan Perera
I believe in god. I also believe that you should never ask god to make your dreams come true. You have to work for your dreams. And dream actually, with all your mind body and soul. I don’t believe luck is when a super power grants us what we wished for. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. So we need to be prepared all the time. Our dream awaits us. It’s already on its way. We just need to be prepared when it gets to us.
Thisuri Wanniarachchi
I believe almost every author have gone through the terribly uncomfortable period between the time of shedding the seeds of a story and waiting to see it flourish as a published book, spending hours watering and fertilizing it. This is a dreadful period, frustrating and depressing.
Ama H. Vanniarachchy
Some say art is our highest form of hope. . . . Perhaps it's our only hope.
Roma Tearne
The confrontation lasted about five minutes; then the display died out as quickly as it had begun, and everyone drank his fill of the muddy water. Honor had been satisfied; each group had staked its claim to its own territory.
Arthur C. Clarke
The physics of gravity was not reserved only for large celestial objects to efficiently exert.
Gayendra Abeywardane
But his own mind was helpless against every moment's headline. He did nothing but leap into the mass of changes and explore them and all the tiny facets so eventually he was completely governed by fears of certainty. He distrusted it in anyone but Nora for there it went to the spine, and yet he attacked it again and again in her, cruelly, hating it, the sure lanes of the probable. Breaking chairs and window glass doors in fury at her certain answers. [15-16]
Michael Ondaatje
We all are wearing many hundred glasses of different colors. So, everyone see the world in different views. Somehow, if we could remove those glasses we can see the world with real colors. Name of the most difficult to remove glass is ‘there are permanent things of mine’.
Muditha Champika
The Buddha, Christ and Mohammed had to rely on God and karma and human priests for judgement; we don’t. We have data. We have algorithms. We have Guidance. God is now available as an application, on your mobile phone or in the cloud, twenty four seven, three sixty five.
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
Watching a parent die is a terrible task. My father, faced with something he could not talk down or browbeat into submission, spent his days with the bottle, as if he determined to drink himself to death, as if his alcohol could hold back the disease that swept through his brain.
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
History is the archaeology of the present and future.
Patrick Mendis
I recounted my adventures, just as I recount them to you now. I told him about Bombay, which glowed in the night like a lamp. I told him about Bangalore, about the beaches of Goa, of Pune, where elaborate retirement homes and ashrams ringed India’s ferociously competitive colleges, and liberals went to experience transcendence without getting their feet dirty. I told him of places you could expand your mind and still be within walking distance of the nearest McDonalds.
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
I just realized that sleep sometimes is the only precious wage for the hard working man.
Akilnathan Logeswaran
But there was a discipline, it was just that we didn't understand. We thought he was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order, what was outside it. He tore apart the plot - see his music was immediately on top of his own life. Echoing. As if, when he was playing he was lost and hunting for the right accidental notes. Listening to him was like talking to Coleman. You were both changing direction with every sentence, sometimes in the middle, using each other as a springboard through the dark. You were moving so fast it was unimportant to finish and clear everything. He would be describing something in 27 ways. There was pain and gentleness everything jammed into each number.
Michael Ondaatje
What I have sought is to understand what has been said.
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
Once you have been tortured, you can never belong in this world. There is no place that ever be your home.
Roma Tearne